Four months earlier, using the audit rights her grandmother’s key had given her, Adele had quietly retained an independent forensic accounting firm and opened a full investigation into eighteen months of Rutherford Packaging’s operations.

No one knew — not her father, not her brother, not a single member of the board.

She had done it the way her grandmother had taught her to do everything that mattered: quietly, thoroughly, and without warning the people it was aimed at.

She had agonized over the decision for weeks before she made it, because launching that audit meant crossing a line she could never step back over.

As long as she only suspected, she could still tell herself a comforting fiction — that she was imagining patterns, that her own family surely wasn’t stealing on the scale she feared, that there might be some innocent explanation for the ghost vendors and the doubled invoices.

The audit would end those fictions.